Fourth Estate £15.99 pp282

Doris Lessing is one of the most important writers of the past 100 years, a shrewd visionary who describes life on our planet both through realistic psychological and political observation — in books such as The Grass is Singing (1949), The Golden Notebook (1962) and The Sweetest Dream (2001) — and through speculative novels penetrating distant reaches of space and time, for example the Canopus in Argos series (1979-83) or Mara and Dann (2000). Her new, short, haunting novel is the sequel to Mara and Dann, and presses home its message that all human civilisations, including our own, eventually come to an end.

Mara and Dann was to my mind the greatest of Lessing’s books, not least because, like its sequel, it can be read with pleasure and profit by any intelligent 12-year-old. In the first book, Lessing transported her human readers thousands of years into the future, near the end of an Ice Age in “Yerrup”that has dried out both the “Middle Sea” between Europe and Africa and the southern part of “Ifrik ”itself. Mara and Dann began that book as children walking from the arid south to the still-green north of Africa, and ended up as young adults acclaimed as lost princes of the Mahondi tribe.

The new book’s long title reflects its fluid, river-like narrative form, which evokes oral storytelling. But the psychology is modern. Tortured Dann is a Hamlet-like hero, paralysed by the death of his energetic elder sister Mara. As he tries to develop some of her skills of reflection and empathy, he is burdened by the hopes of the body of fighting men who expect General Dann to lead them in conquest of the “Tundra”. But Dann is maddened by grief and tormented by his ignorance in the face of a vanished cultural past — which includes distant, fractured pieces of our own civilisation. Lessing pierces the heart with the half-quotations that Dann’s scribes scribble down as the books fall to dust in their hands: “. . . Rose thou art sick”; “. . . all the oceans”; “. . . rise from the dead to say the sun is shining . . . ” Dann is sustained in his isolation by a younger captain, Griot, by the marvellous snow-dog Ruff, and by the scholar Ali, heir to the infinitely old and now almost defunct Kharab culture, but all of them are watching a world slide under the water.

Whereas Mara and Dann was above all an adventure story telling the primal human tale of emigration and survival, this novel is a parable for the 21st century. The ice, like ours, is melting, cracking and groaning as great chunks slide into the ocean; sea levels are rising; cities are being drowned — but the human populations think “it will last us our time”, and do nothing. Still writing in her ninth decade, Lessing has much wisdom to impart, though she is astute enough not to preach but instead to pose unsettling questions. Some are small, but apposite to our celebrity culture — why are some people, such as Dann, adored for the way they look, their voice, their ancestry, despite every kind of failing, and others, such as Griot, who is more deserving, taken for granted? Other questions are more profound: how can we continue to live and work in the face of the knowledge that everything disappears, starting with the people loved in a single human lifetime and moving on to books, whole forms of knowledge, languages, cities, civilisations? Dann perpetually asks himself how he can bear “to do again, to do again” in a world that Lessing shows (unusually for her) to be full of weeping.

Perhaps, after two dozen novels, great novelists also ask themselves that question sometimes. Occasionally, this book is hard going because we spend a lot of time in the company of depressed, immobilised Dann, but usually the loyal snow-dog appears in the nick of time to cheer us on, or Lessing simply succours us with one of her unforgettable visual images. We shiver and marvel as we lose ourselves in time, watching vast armies of our unimaginably distant descendants sleep under a “white splinter of moon” among bushes where insects click and sing besides the marshes, “immensities of gleaming water and reeds” that have long ago covered our own ruins.

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